Binchois the Borrower

Abstract

Abstract In his chanson Je me merveil/J’ay pluseurs fois, Jacob de Senleches issues a censure that strikes the modern listener as surprisingly familiar. Lamenting that many around him are attempting composition, he resolves to relinquish his craft, since, as he says, they are engaged in copying, or imitating, the work of others (‘se veult meller de contrefaire’). Senleches’s comment is clearly, and cleverly, ironic: he sets the word ‘contrefaire’ to a direct quotation, as Yolanda Plumley has revealed, of Philippus de Caserta’s En attendant souffrir; indeed, lest there be any doubt about it, Senleches quotes the song’s opening. Nor is this the only time that the latter draws on the farmer’s work: Senleches’s En attendant, Esperance contains its own musical reference to En attendant souffrir, one of a network of musical and textual interconnections which, as Plumley has traced, link his music with that of other composers working in the musical hothouse of the ars subtilior.

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